Researchers have studied DNA methylation in brain tissue to see if there’s an association between that modification and psychiatric disease for some time now. But the results haven’t been all that eye-popping.

A hard-working crew from Johns Hopkins and Harvard explain that those studies used brain preparations that contained bulk brain, which includes a buffet of different types of cells, many of which exhibit different ratios in the various parts of the brain. This can really put a damper on DNA methylation analyses since the methylation marks can vary dramatically in different cell types, regardless of whether someone has a disease. And in some psychiatric diseases, certain brain regions containing various cell types can become larger or smaller, skewing DNA methylation results.

The scientists figured if they could correct for that heterogeneity, they might find some real, honest-to-goodness DNA methylation differences that they could pin to disease. Here’s a little of what they did:

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